Xie is extremely sensitive to the pain in the world, refusing to eat meat, trying to protect all life at all costs, physically debilitated by the destruction of the environment, moves to a small southern town with his father and befriends two young women. Together they start an animal rights group culminating in an act that gets Xie kicked out of high school. Without the constraint of a schedule, Xie spends his evenings in the woods near his home, one of the only places where he can function without anxiety. One evening he finds a small church in the woods, inside it, a cabinet with the bones of Catholic Saint Pancratius, or as Xie calls him, P. Xie falls in love with P, steals the relic, hides it in his bed, and begins a sexual relationship with both the bones and the spirit of P. who accompanies Xie like an imaginary friend through this tumultuous year. The unsettling, even suffocating at times, tone of the story is underscored by the physical style on the page. Written in a stream of consciousness with awkward punctuation, all from inside Xie’s head, readers will be absorbed in the way the story makes them feel more than by what happens. It is a disorienting and lyrical story that is hard to explain or classify, but even harder to shake or forget, filled with questions that need to be asked, but most likely, do not have an answer. Give to readers who like thought provoking tales where the atmosphere takes precedence over the plot, like The Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Jesus and John by Adam McOmber.
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